Gingter Ale

Fluent stories of a software engineer

Setting up my infrastructure - Part 5: Additional tools, server and hosting

2013-03-01

In this post I’m going to mention all the other necessary stuff for a project like mine.

Preamble: Actually, it is a spare time, private thing, and as such I don’t want to spent too much money on it. I also don’t (yet?) know how long this will take and as such don’t want to pay too much. Especially not on subscriptions for services.

So, where to start? I think source control is the most important thing for a software project, so let’s go.

Source control

I chose Git. In the first infrastructure post I already mentioned some of my versioning tooling (which in fact already changed up to now). I have a lot of experience with SVN, not yet so much with Git, but as I already mentioned it seems that from an adoption and acception point of view Git is the new mainstream source control tool. It is powerful, it is cross-platform, and GUI clients support is growing. My other alternative would be Mercurial (Hg), but despite it’s better windows GUI clients, adoption is not that good and I want to be able to ask questions on StackOverflow and get help quickly.

So, I already said I was using Bitbucket from Atlassian for hosting free private repositories. This is only partially correct by now. I decided to self-host my repositories and use bitbucket as an additional off-site backup for my repositories. Why is that? I don’t want to be fully dependent on a single point of failure (Bitbucket). They host in the cloud, and we all saw that the big cloud players like Amazon with EC3 and Microsoft with Azure can encounter large-scale problems. Even if Atlassian takes all precocious measures to keep their service available, which is probably not the case given a lot of people are only using the free stuff, something really stupid like expired certificates at the cloud side could render the service unavailable for hours or even days.

My idea is the following: I mainly work on my self-hosted repository. Whenever my build server has a new successful build, it will automatically push that to the Bitbucket repo. This way I have a repo backup on my dev mashine, Bitbucket with the latest fully working state (since you commit and push often, that should not be too far away from my local copy) and of course my self-hosted repo. That should be enough safety in case something happens to my notebook, my server or Atlassian.

Speaking of Atlassian, they have this great Git client SourceTree for Mac. They recently announced opening up a beta test for SourceTree for Windows via Twitter. Guess what? I signed up ;-)

You see, I use Bitbucket from them, I use SourceTree on the Mac from them and I’m eager to get experience with their SourceTree for Windows. Atlassian is very present in my Git-centric versioning environment, which is why I also started to use their product Stash. Stash is BitBucket on my own server. I can create repositories, manage permissions (okay, currently I’m the only user) and have it automatically manage my branches. And it is very cheap at yearly 10 USD for 10 potential users. So when my project succeeds, and I stock up my development team beyond 10, then I for sure will have the money to upgrade.

Source quality

Since you now the tooling I use to store my sources and to manage it on my server and my development machine I want to introduce another tool I bought and installed, even if it’s usefulness is (currently) questionable. I bought FishEye and Crucible from Atlassian to. At 10 USD each it was not a real investment, and I feel that FishEye lets me keep control over my code more easily. It allows fast searching through all the project code (in 5 repositories for 10 users) and lets me browse through the history of my code in a convenient way. Crucible as a code review tool is probably not of so much use for a one man show, but perhaps later on somebody want to join my efforts with this project and potentially participate on revenues, if this becomes successful. Crucible is the only tool thats the 10 USD for only 5 and not 10 users.

Hosting

For a long time I had a hosted Linux root server (dune) at Strato for 49€ / month. It used to host my email server (I completely switched to Gmail for my domain a few years ago), hosted my first blogs, some home pages and discussion forums for the guilds when I still was playing. Besides that I had a very small Windows Server at 1&1 (smarthost), which I got for 14 € / month as a special offer during my studies. But it was not powerful enough to replace all services on dune.

As I already posted, this blog (and almost all other things hosted on dune and smarthost) now moved to Gallifrey. Gallifrey is a big Windows Server 2012 ‘Level 4’ V-Server at Strato, with 4 virtual CPU cores, 4 Gig of ram and a 250 GB HDD. Enough power to host those littles web sites, my blog and my complete build environment. I ordered Gallifrey when there was a 6-month free offer and it is at 29€ / month. So I canceled dune and smarthost, which will in fact save me about 34€ / month while at the same time offering more power.

Backup

As already mentioned, my sources will be automatically backed up to BitBucket. By now, I also put the sources of this blog and all other homepages into Git repositories which are also automatically backed up this way. All databases are dumped on a regular basis and copied over both my home server and a cloud storage. Same goes for the working directories with config files and changing contents. They are copied to a backup location, zipped and transferred together with the database dumps. All that is triggered by a scheduled task on the v-server.

Summary

So the toolset for my pet project is right now:

Update: Fixed some typos. Thanks Manuel :)

Continue with the next part, or see the other parts in this series

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